“I like the idea of things lasting longer than you last.” – Keith Haring
An undeniably romantic view of New York in the late ‘70s thru the mid-eighties has been stoked by artists and musicians who either lived through that time or have been influenced by cultural work and workers of that era. The romance is paradoxically tied to the fact that the city was broke, full of crime and grime, and a magnet for outcasts. Its spectacular fall from highbrow cultural grace had rendered it a place of DIY possibility. In the The Universe of Keith Haring, director Christina Clausen captures the power of New York at that time through both the personal narrative of Keith Haring (the quintessential small-town boy who moves to the big city to make his way) and through the commentary of artists and gallerists in the film who fill in details on club life, art school, queer culture in the ‘80s, the multiple thriving and music scenes, the ways graffiti artists influenced the art establishment, and various day-job hustles to survive.
When the documentary was first released in 2008, it was an elegy for Haring and a snapshot of a New York that no longer existed. Watching the film today, as the Big Apple nears its total transformation into a playground for the global elite, the film also serves as a eulogy for a New York whose perfect-storm sociopolitical conditions made it a hotbed of unbridled creativity.
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In many ways, Universe is pro forma documentary filmmaking. Original interviews with its star subject’s family, friends and professional peers are interspersed with old photos and video footage. What elevates the film is the extent to which Haring’s life was so well documented by cameras from the start and through his short life. An artistically inclined father and schoolboy friends who were themselves artists/fledgling filmmakers gave Clausen a treasure trove of material with which to work when fleshing out daily life in Haring’s childhood home of Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Similarly, the photos and video footage supplied by art-school friends, capturing everything from nights on the town to studio time to installation projects, gives a captivating picture of the artist as a young man – including his early forays into making chalk drawings in the New York subway. (There’s even footage of him being arrested.)
What saves the film from being pure hagiography are the insights offered into both his technique and what he brought to the art world and world at large. Controversial art world figure Jeffrey Deitch breaks down the power of his instantly identifiable style, with its deceptively simple lines. David LaChapelle explains how Haring’s Pop Shop has been woefully (perhaps intentionally) misunderstood by the art world, that it was never really intended to be a money making endeavor but was instead meant to make the art accessible to the masses, to sidestep the exclusivity of galleries and museums. And Yoko Ono gives a succinct, fantastic explanation of meaning and meaninglessness in art, juxtaposing Andy Warhol’s approach and goals with Haring’s.
But it’s a teary Kenny Scharf who, in simply speaking about how much he misses his friend, will break your heart.
Keith Haring died of AIDS at the age of 31 in 1990.
Ernest Hardy is a Sundance Fellow whose music and film criticism have appeared in the New YorkTimes, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and LA Weekly. His collection of criticism, Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions (2006) was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award.
